Much Ado about Nothing

Some topics exercize a somewhat irrational fascination on competition lawyers and should not.

Take, for instance, “hub and spoke agreements“. Lately, this topic has been amongst the trendiest issues in competition law circles.

However, those are just ordinary vertical agreements with horizontal anticompetitive effects (read collusion). Conceptually, they should be dealt with along the lines of multi-agency contracts, english clauses, single branding agreements and so on.

Viewing hub and spoke agreements as a novel kind of agreements is purely formalistic reasoning.

The bottom-line: I will fight any proposal to organise an event on hub and spoke agreements :).